Distinguished Villa – Finborough Theatre, London

Writer: Kate O’Brien

Director: Hugh Fraser

Distinguised Villa by controversial Irish playwright Kate O’Brien was first performed in London in 1926 and never seen again until this sparkling revival at the Finborough, directed by Hugh Fraser. It’s a tremendous piece of writing: a fresh, funny and ultimately serious exposure of the stifling nature of social convention in a society dominated by class prejudice. And it’s curiously timely now to see a play writtenin the year of the Queen’s birth: it invites us to wonder afresh at the strange relationship between Britishness and social class.

The entire drama takes place in the respectable front room of suburban couple, Mabel and Natty Hemsworth, its miniaturised glory brilliantly designed by Mim Houghton (although presenting romantic John Morris’s primroses are daffodils is strange). At first it seems no more than a social comedy. Snobbish Mabel (a lively Mia Austen), troubled with nerves like a latter-day Mrs Bennett, is Natty’s dominating wife. Her watch-words are ‘respectable’ and ‘refined’, and she is forever peeking out from her net-curtained window. She is thrilled to learn that neighbours think she should rename their house ‘Distinguished Villa.’ Natty, sympathetically portrayed by Matthew Ashforde, is a kindly middle-aged man in a meaningless job, with a secret longing for a life of the mind.

The Hemworths are childless, but share their house with two unmarried women: the unlikely lodger, the elegantly enigmatic Frances Llewellyn, to which Holly Sumpton brings warmth and charm, and Mabel’s younger sister, Gwendolyn, winning portrayed by Tess Bonham Jones. Gwendolyn is engaged to decent John Morris (Brian Martin). Mabel, however, feels John isn’t good enough, comparing him unfavourably to the superficially charming Alec Webberley, the admirer of Frances. Martin, as John, and Simon Haines as Alec, do their best with these rather wooden parts. Worrying, in Mabel’s eyes, is that John is too ‘passionate’. Gwendolyn’s passion, however, is for the fantasy of life of the silver screen. No one seems to bat an eyelid when she announces she and John are to see The Lure of Lust. But John is like Leonard Bast in EM Forster’s Howard’s End: he is drawn to solitary walks in nature – a code for a longing for that same life of the mind for which Natty longs.

At first it seems that Frances will be the chief protagonist, as her fondness for this suburban family develops. She is an independent woman, a writer, smilingly rejecting Alec Webberley’s hammy proposal. She sees something in Natty that Mabel can’t or won’t see. Names are all important in this play and Natty’s playful renaming of Frances as Ethelreda charms her in a way that Alec’s insistence on the diminutive ‘Frankie’ does not. But in fact it is really the tormented Natty who develops into the play’s most intriguing character. ‘Give us a kiss?’ he forlornly asks the implacable Mabel. He retreats into his modest record collection – a nice period detail is his gramophone and collection of 78 rpm records.

Kate O’Brien vividly conjures the claustrophobia of their marriage, and Natty’s acute depression. His painful descent into full-scale emotional breakdown is powerfully written and is played by Ashforde with heart-breaking conviction. We long for him to walk out of the front door, like Ibsen’s Nora, but we sense he cannot imagine a life outside of his suburban home. Distinguished Villa is a highly entertaining play which gradually darkens and deepens.

Runs until 1 October 2022